Last September, some of the Debian Linux distribution's leadership wanted to make sure that Etch, the next version of Debian, arrived on its December 4th due date. Almost two months later, though, according to the February 17th Release Critical Bug Report memo to the Debian Developers Announcement list, there are still 541 release critical bugs.

I think you're missing the big picture here. They paid the release managers, yet when the developers slow down there's no release. Now exactly who should they have paid to speed up the release? Common sense would say to pay the guys actually working to squash bugs and get the damn thing out the door, not glorified mailing list managers.